The former head of the Office of Special Counsel “wanted to ‘ship out’” ALL the agency’s gay employees to Detroit, according to a government report released Wednesday.

Special Counsel Scott Bloch, who served under the Bush administration from 2003 to 2007, established a field office in Detroit and reassigned several gay employees to the new location. But there is no evidence that those reassignments “were taken for a legitimate business purpose of the agency,” according to the report released by Inspector General Patrick McFarland.

“Mr. Bloch and his immediate staff offered an array of ostensible explanations [for the reassignments] in press releases, Congressional testimony, and interviews with the investigative team, seeking to link the reassignments to the bona fide operational needs of the agency,” the report stated. “However, our investigation developed evidence which tended to undermine the proffered explanations.”

The report suggests the reassignments were instead based on anti-gay sentiments.

Richard Trefry, a government contractor, told investigators that Bloch “spontaneously explained” his desire to “ship out” a number of gay employees. Bloch allegedly told him he “HAD A LICENSE TO DO THIS.”

The coverage of the opening of this vast temple to prevarication and ruin is not about bricks and mortar. It’s about an attempt by the courtier press to absolve itself of a dereliction of duty that rivaled even that of the president in question while New Orleans drowned, and while the economy was bubbling toward disaster. (That dereliction of duty, it should be noted, now and forever, began with the coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, and the disgraceful performance of the elite political press corps towards Al Gore.)

It’s about their efforts to help the country absolve itself from the immense damage it brought upon itself by electing, and then re-electing, a half-bright dry drunk who wrecked nearly everything he touched, and who now is trying to rehabilitate himself by explaining that he hasn’t ruined anything else since he left office, and doesn’t that make him a swell fella.

The elite press is dedicating an entire day of coverage to the perpetuation of a monstrous public lie. Electing George W. Bush twice was a monumental act of democratic self-destruction from which the country has yet to recover. Celebrating him celebrating himself is simply to pour battery acid into the still-open wounds. I will take theories about dinosaurs in ancient China over the notion that George W. Bush was a good man confronted by insurmountable problems dropped on him by an implacable universe of chance. He was a career fk-up, from start to finish, and he finally found himself in a job where Daddy’s money and Daddy’s lawyers couldn’t bail him out.

No, he doesn’t deserve the day. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis who don’t get today.

The phrase “dry drunk” has two significant words for the alcoholic. “Dry” refers to the abstinence from drinking, whereas “drunk” signifies a deeply pathological condition resulting from the use of alcohol in the past.

“But to be honest with you, Neil, it goes back to there’s a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly and say he was the worst President since Herbert Hoover and said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which was nonsense. He was anti-his own party and people — people don’t forget that. You can disagree but if you’re disagreeable (Hey Old Man, that’s one of the reasons Obama kicked you ass in ’08!), then people don’t forget that.”

A monkey wearing a shearling coat and diapers was found wandering around an Ikea parking lot in Toronto, reported the CBC.

The monkey’s owner, who was shopping at the home and furniture store, put the monkey in a crate inside her car, but it managed to escape. “It’s a smart monkey,” Toronto Police Sgt. Ed Dzingala told the CBC.

The woman who believes she was the first to spot the animal told the CBC, “It was the weirdest thing. I thought I was going insane.”

“It seemed like it was screaming around for someone [it] knew. It was sad,” she said.